Suburban pool house~desert bath house a regionally-appropriate water concious living unit; justification for the single-family swimming pool Item Type text; Electronic Thesis Authors Bradley, Patrick Joseph Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 26/09/2021 10:02:11 Item License http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/192293 Suburban Pool House~ Desert Bath House A Regionally-Appropriate, Water Concious Living Unit; Justifi cation for the Single-Family Swimming Pool Table of Contents 1. Introduction 4 Historical Consumption 4 Tucson/ Pima County Water Use 6 2. Project Defi nition 10 Case Study: Material Assembly_Stereotomy~Tectonics 11 Case Study: Wet Construction 17 Case Study: Sequence_Ritual_Procession 19 3. Body_Movement_Programmatic Performance 27 4.Site Condtitions 32 5. Resolution 39 6. Resources Abstract Historically the bathing culture and its architecture has been rooted in environments with prevalent natural water resourc- es, rendering water an appropriate means of cleansing and relaxation in many parts of the world. Today, in the Sonoran Desert of the southwestern United States, a bathing culture of private swimming pools continues, but the water resource to sustain the lifestyle does not. The Desert Pool House takes a position as a dry “bath house” to acknowledge the wasteful- ness of the backyard swimming pool. It attempts to offset if not balance the squander and water loss of the artificial body of water, and provide the architectural experiences of cleans- ing and relaxation, with careful integration of material logic and assembly, lighting, and procession, without the immod- erate use and/ or waste of desert water. At its essence the Suburban pool house works to exhibit the issues surrounding water conservation in our desert, and forces us to find a way to live sensitively with swimming pools if we are to live with them at all Introduction Historical Consumption Dating as early as the Paleolithic Europeans, the Ancient Egyptians, the Greeks, and especially the Ancient Romans, the spa culture and notion of relaxation with water is none too new in our history. One could likely argue that this link of body and water has sparked some of our earliest architectural unions with the landscape. Where buildings could not be built around a natural thermal hot spring, Roman plumbing brought nature into building, and accentuated natural water tempera- tures with engineered heating and cooling systems. The ther- Baths of Caracalla, Rome, 212 AD mal bath house has been our shelter of repose—an architecture growing from nature and its natural phenomena. It has always been dependent on the renewable resource of reviving water. Around 12 BC, 381 miles of aqueducts fed into Rome’s 926 public baths. The baths, fed by natural surface and under- ground sources, consumed 300 gallons of water per person, per day—almost the amount used by a family of four today.1 Two thousand years later in the American southwest and Southern Arizona we find a contemporary society with a similar interest in water culture and “bathing”. Two thousand years ago, during the time of the Romans, this region sup- ported widespread agriculture with running rivers and flood plains—it would have been able to sustain a Native American bath culture according to its plentiful water resources. The Santa Cruz River ran perennially through Tucson, a wide and shallow body of water choked with vegetation and a multitude Roman Thermal Baths, Bath, England, 100 AD of animal species.2 At this time, and even as late as the early 1900s, the Tucson water table was so high that one could hand dig a water well and tap into the abundant resource. After World War II the rise of suburban culture increased develop- ment across greater plots of land, and cheaper electricity and turbine pumps facilitated the expansion of irrigated agricul- ture in the region.3 Consumers tapped the water resource and consequently spurred the recession of the aquifer. Since then the natural Arizona surface waters have receded almost entirely; the perennial Rio Santa Cruz has become the Arroyo Santa Cruz, active only following large monsoon events. By 2005 the aquifer had receded to approximately 250 feet below the land surface in the center of Tucson, and between 1989 and 2005 the city surface subsequently subsided by about 1.2 inches.4 Water has become a rarity in the region; yet, our bathing culture remains. 1 Iovine, Julie V. Spa: The Sensuos Experience. 9 2 Woodard, Gary 2008 Biltmore Hotel, 1929, Albert McArthur, Phoenix, Arizona 3 Woodard, Gary 2008 4 USGS 2005 4 The southwestern United States has witnessed an apparent shift in the nature of the bathing culture with respect to histori- cal precedent. The pre-WWII development of a pool culture in the United States clearly drew from the ancient example as a model. The Wilmington Evening Post noted in 1925 with the opening of a new municipal pool, that “…everybody seemed imbued with the community spirit and bent on hav- ing a thoroughly good time. Men, women, children of the Ninth ward section are getting acquainted with each other and cementing bonds of community friendship such as can only be gained through intimacy in aquatic sports…” The American bath culture of the early twentieth century, much like that of ancient Rome, emphasized the power of community in the Arizona Inn Swimming Pool, Tucson, Arizona 1945 ritual of cleansing, bathing, and relaxation. The public bath, or later American “pool” was a place to see one’s neighbors and be seen by the public; a place of interaction in addition to purification. The postwar notion of the suburban “house in the garden” shifted not only the American lifestyle but sentenced the American bath culture to a decline in publicity and commu- nal interaction. As Americans began to privatize their living conditions, they chose to separate themselves not only their neighbors but those with which they bathed as well. The suburban “swim club” soon became a common (exclusive) institution, though the proliferation of residential swimming pools was soon to follow.1 From 1950, the 2,500 American in-ground swimming pools eventually grew to 4 million by 1999.2 The historic notion of the public bath had quickly shifted to a culture of individualized, private artificial ponds per household rather than per neighborhood or community. The American consumption and waste of water, regardless of regional abundance, also increased accordingly. 1 Wiltse 182 Scottsdale, Arizona 2008 2 Wiltse 182 288 Football fi elds_ Swimming Pool Area_ .61 sq mi Pima County_.61 sq mi Reid Park, Tucson_ .24 sq mi Tucson/ Pima County Water Use By 2007, 37,785 of the 189,077 single family residences in Pima County included in-ground backyard swimming pools.1 With a median surface area 450 square feet,2 this combines to a total area of about .61 square miles of exposed water bodies- the equivalent of about 286 football fields of water. In Tucson the annual evaporation of exposed water bodies totals at 75 inches, with a12 inch gain from precipitation, though a net loss of 63 inches per year. Thus, Tucson’s .6 square miles of exposed water bodies has the potential to lose as much as 667,699,200 gallons of water each year from evaporation. Only roughly 3/5 of pool owners in Tucson use pool covers, which would effectively serve for evaporation prevention, guaranteeing the loss of about 209 million gal- lons of water annually from uncovered pools. Yet, as covers facilitate rapid warming and thermal discomfort in swimming 8’ pools, they are generally not implemented in the summer months when evaporation rates are highest. Because of this it is likely that Pima County’s single family swimming pools lose as much as 467 million gallons of water annually due to Uncovered 8’ Swimming Pool evaporation. Evaporation: 75 in/ year Precipitation: 12 in/ year 1 Woodard, Gary 2007 Net Water Loss: 63 in/ year 2 Woodard, Gary 2007 6 Water Area Baths of Caracalla, Rome, 212 AD Therme Vals, Switzerland, Peter Zumthor, 1995 Biltmore Hotel, Albert McArthur, Phoenix, Arizona, 1929 Unfortunately our contemporary society of the arid southwest now favors a private bath culture, consuming water at rates that our landscape can no longer sustain. As a result, the water resources that may have historically sparked the growth of bath architecture no longer exist, and any new water-fo- cused building then threatens only to contribute to a worsening problem in this desert region. The Roman Baths of Caracalla existed in a place of abundant water resources, likely contain- ing 3.3 million gallons of water in an enclosure protected from evaporation. Tucson’s swimming pools contain 668 million gallons of water exposed to the sun and sky. This begins to question whether the notion of the ancient spa culture can and maybe should continue today in a dry architecture of the des- Scottsdale, Arizona, 2009 ert. Can one continue to have a spa experience in the absence of water? Can the architecture of a contemporary desert “bath house” serve to offset, if not balance or at least not contribute to our current trend of water consumption and waste by the open-air, southwestern American swimming pool? The Santa Cruz River seen from the southern face of Sentinal Peak in Tucson, Arizona. Views of the river over the past century indicate that water levels and resources have declined substantially due to conspiculous water consumption.